Clausius
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Afterword to my book
The following is an excerpt from the final chapter of my book, Block by Block – The Historical and Theoretical Foundations of Thermodynamics, in which I took a step back to share a few insights and observations I unexpectedly gathered along the way. Happy the man, who, studying nature’s laws, Thro’ known effects can trace… Continue reading
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How Shannon’s entropy met Clausius’s entropy in one illustration
I took a course from Edward Tufte a long while ago on the visual display of information and loved it. He challenged us to design single illustrations to tell our story, using the classic illustration (here) of Napoleon’s march to Moscow as a great example. I took on this challenge in creating illustrations for Block… Continue reading
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Clausius, the gadfly, and the power of asking penetrating questions
As I shared previously (here), in 1857 Rudolf Clausius published [1] his derivation of the kinetic theory of gases in which he connected the world of moving and colliding atoms to the ideal gas law: PV = nRT. Based on his work, Clausius hypothesized that absolute temperature is proportional to the average kinetic energy of… Continue reading
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Revisiting the kinetic theory of gases
My vision is to develop a ground-up understanding of thermodynamics based on connecting the micro-world of moving and interacting atoms to the macro-world of thermodynamic phenomena and the classical equations used to describe them. In the below post, which I previously shared, I delve into the originating micro-to-macro work of Clausius, Maxwell, and Boltzmann when… Continue reading
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Physical chemistry – a new field in science
As a young man I tried to read thermodynamics, but I always came up against entropy as a brick wall that stopped any further progress. – James Swinburne (1904) [1] The second law of thermodynamics, which is known also as the law of the dissipation or degradation of energy, or the law of the increase… Continue reading
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Clausius: “The entropy of the universe tends to a maximum” – a statement built on an assumption
Before continuing my journey into the thermodynamic world of J. Willard Gibbs, I wanted to take a step back and revisit Rudolf Clausius’s final sentence in his ninth and final memoir on the mechanical theory of heat (here is link to all nine memoirs that ran from 1850 to 1865). Clausius’s Ninth Memoir Realizing that… Continue reading
Block by Block – The Historical and Theoretical Foundations of Thermodynamics. “Hanlon has written a masterpiece.” – Mike Pauken, Senior Engineer, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and author of Thermodynamics for Dummies
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About Me
Hi! I’m Bob Hanlon. After earning my Sc.D. in chemical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and enjoying a long career in both industry and academia, I’ve returned to school, my own self-guided school, seeking to better understand the world of thermodynamics. Please join me on my journey.
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